OK, on this tablet, how many times did you compress and/or recompress the disk, of course not counting the times that were done before you imaged/reimaged the system using external cloning tools?

I understand that it appears like there were at least three compression operations:

"In fact, since WOF assigns data source IDs sequentially starting at 0, there must have been at least 3 separate extraction operations done on this volume without re-formatting."

However, if I understood your earlier reports correctly, you did one compression operation (referred to as an extraction operation above, because the compressed image is extracted after being created onto the target partition in WIMBoot mode), and then immediately ran into the issue during your second compression operation?

Please let us know if this understanding is correct or mistaken. This way we'll be able to refine our research some more.